seriously, you should refuse to act. if the mayor is not going to do his part, why should you do yours? i suppose the good news -- thank you. >> thank you very much. >> commissioners, as the previous speaker mentioned, this body sent this letter to mayor lee regarding jul gomez, president of the san francisco library commission, recommending she be removed from office. on february 2 of this year, they re-elected her, again unanimously, only nominated her for president and i was at the meeting and made comments to which she took offense.

[audio recording] [inaudible] >> he's the center of the

universe and he can say whatever he wants but this is civil discourse and he cannot say whatever he wants. i know 12 people who will bury him. >> that was ms. gomez saying she knew 12 people who would f -- bury me. [inaudible]

[audio recording] >> i apologize for the poor quality of that but basically what she said was if she could have, she would have thrown the f -- microphone with me and garroted me with the microphone cord and the following week she went to the san francisco police department and filed a complaint against me. she didn't sound very upset to me. she was laughing and joking with other members of the commission and the commission secretary and yet she went to the police department and filed a property property -- police report which said she was in fear of me. >> good evening, commissioners. i've been before you for your last several meetings asking you when you are going to schedule a

hearing on my two sunshine complaints that were referred to regarding official misconduct against your executive director, mr. st. croix. it's been over five months, going on six. when are you going to schedule a hearing open to the public on sunshine complaint 11-013 and 11-014. i've been here begging you to schedule that hearing. i deserve my day in court. as the previous speakers have testified, this commission had 18 willful failure and official misconduct charges referred to it that you simply tossed out, did you nothing. then, jul gomez came along and you finally took action and referred her for official misconduct to the mayor, following your finding, i went

up to her after the meeting and i congratulated her at being the first person in history that this commission has ever referred to the mayor for action. her response was to bend over, picking up her book bag and her jacket and she snapped her jacket at me trying to strike me with it because she didn't like my apparent sarcasm. i wasn't trying to be sarcastic, i was just offering her congratulations for being the first person to have been found guilty. since then, the mayor has done nothing and he knows and you know that her behavior was on-duty behavior which, following the then airport commissioner, joseph mazzola appeal, an appellate court ruled that official misconduct can only be brought for actions

related to one's actual job duties. so this commission has no business hearing any kind of official misconduct case against sheriff mirkarimi no matter how reprehensible his actions may or may not have been because they were off-duty behavior and it occurred before he was sworn in. it had nothing to do with his job duties. if you conduct some kind of kangaroo court hearing and the mayor hasn't acted on-duty official misconduct of ms. gomez but you pursue off-duty misconduct against sheriff mirkarimi, you will be conducting a mockery of ethical behavior.

>> good afternoon, i'm peter warfollowed, executive director of library users association. the previous speakers have spoken, i think, very vividly of the unfortunate and worse-than unfortunate behavior of the library commission president, jul gomez, at a meeting in which she shouted down a member of the public and prevented her from having her right to speak and make public comment under free speech and sunshine laws in the state and in the city. as was previously pointed out, there were 18 referrals from the sunshine ordinance task force. this was a unanimous 6-0 ruling of willful violation and they sent it to you. you found that there was willful

misconduct and official misconduct but for various reasons sent a separate letter to the mayor essentially recommending that she be sacked. nothing has happened of the sort. instead, as you've heard also, she was kept in office by the mayor's appointees, all seven of the library commissioners, and they unanimously elected her president, once again, after your finding, and she stays in position as library commission president. her misbehavior was very clearly in the core of what she was doing as library commission president. she, as president, is in charge of running the meetings and the violation to the member of the

public and to everybody, really, was core to her responsibility as president of the commission. others testified at the sunshine ordinance task force and personally that the behavior of shouting down a member of the public was so disturbing and distressing to them when they were in the room and i'm not talking about myself or any of the other who have spoken today, testified they felt truly intimidated and frightened to speak and did not speak at the commission meeting as a result of this behavior. for your action to have absolutely no visible impact whatsoever on the library commission, no impact whatsoever from the mayor and an endorsement of the bad behavior

by re-election i think is scandalous and raises serious questions as to whether and how you'll act in your upcoming matter. thank you. of. >>. >> is there any other public comment at this time? seeing none, i'm going to propose a change in the order of the next few items. when the agenda was determined, we didn't realize that somebody from the library staff was going to be here and out of respect for this person's time, we're going to move that item up now to deal with the final attention to the s.i.a. and then return to the random audit and public finance issues that involve all of us. is that -- i apologize. the staff did tell me about it. i was of the view that it would

not affect the public comment items. let's take the proposed amendments to the statement of incompatible activities for the public library. would you like to introduce this? >> at his last meeting, the commission initially approved the draft changes to the statement of incompatible activities for the san francisco public library and since that time, the city department of human resources, the ethics commission and the public library engaged in meeting, confer with the unions that represent the employees affected by the s.i.a., because we have satisfied the meeting confer obligations under the law, the commission may now proceed to finally adopt the proposed changes and once they're finally adopted, what we will do is send them to the -- to the library

and i'm happy to answer any questions. and donna marian from the library is also here. >> hello, ms. marion. do you want to add anything to the status report? >> i want to reaffirm that the library did have the meet and confer and received no objections. >> do the commissioners have questions for ms. angle or ms. marion? >> we stand as we left them at the last meeting. >> i'll entertain a motion on the proposal that's before us now that all of the steps have been carried out and then invite public comment on the motion. >> i would move that we accept the amendments as approved at the last meeting. >> i will second that motion. >> thank you. any public comment on the proposal about the s.i.a.?

>> patrick. i did not see in the library's amended statement of incompatible activities holding to position of commission president following a finding that the ethics commission found her in willful misconduct of the sunshine ordinance. one would reasonably expect that if ms. gomez was referred to the mayor for removal, for official misconduct, on duty, that it would be embedded in the s.i.a. and that there would be some formal action taken against her. to the extent that there is not anything in the s.i.a. addressing willful misconduct on the job, the whole s.i.a.

process is also made a mockery. you can't have library commission presidents attempting to strike a member of the public, that would be me, which you didn't do a thing about or lift a finger to follow up with the mayor, that the good ms. gomez was first found in official misconduct and then she attempted to strike a member of the public. that behavior, had i pursued it, could have been criminal, and there's nothing in the s.i.a. that addresses potential criminal striking of the member of the public in city hall and allowing her to keep serving on the library commission. you need to go back to the s.i.a. drawing board and embed

in every s.i.a. for every city department that official misconduct is automatically grounds for removal. >> yes, good afternoon, commissioners. i did appear at several previous hearings on this item. i'm sorry that i was not here the last time when it was initially approved because there are a number of objections i have made previously and i want to reiterate now. there's no department in this city where the private influence is a greater problem and in fact there's no department that has greater pride in the fact that they are a public-private partnership. they have this idea that if the library would be required to follow the rules that the rest of the city follows that they'd

be in trouble all the time. well, voila, that's exactly why they should have to follow the rules that the rest of the city has to follow. let me give you one small example. this is the private entity's report that they have to submit to the california attorney general, the private part of their private-public partnership is the friends of the public library. on the front page of this it says, did you receive any and funding from any governmental resource? no. if you turn to page 15, the question is, "did you receive anything of value from a governmental entity without charge?" again, zero, zero, zero, for the past five years, they contend they've received nothing of value in services or facilities from the san francisco public

library, which, of course, is nonsense. they use the facilities for all kinds of things. they sell naming opportunities, they gather books, they gather donations. what they get from the library side is this lack of disclosure. this is a scandal that a department like this is basically privately run, all of their policy determinations are this private entity and in fact this is the essential idea of every con artist. it's called hubris. as far as they're concerned, responsibility is for fools. i hope you understand that these two things go together. if corruption were not synonymous with responsibility, abuse would not be synonymous

with leadership. there's no accountability because they've got enough money to pay off everybody you could go and complain to and one of the places we can start is this statement of incompatible activities. make it as strict as the system allows. thank you. >> commissioners, ray hart, director san francisco open government. on march 1, the friends of the public library and i'd like this to remain on the overhead because i'll be using a number of documents there. the friends of the san francisco public library issued this report and presented it before the library commission. and basically, this is what cuglean from the report of the they said they raised the total

revenue by source of $3.75 million, they provided program support to library programs for $750,000, which leaves only $3 million unaccounted for. in addition, what they did not include in the report, which i got from this, which is an audited statement that the friends of the library are required to provide the city library in each year, was that they also drew down their assets by $2.22 million. that was not even mentioned. so basic leerks the friends spent more than $5 million and accounted to the library commission for $750,000, period. now, this is similar to what they always do when they present this to the commission and the commission goes, oh, how wonderful, and it is a pattern that has consisted for at least the five years as reported by

the friends of the library to charity navigator. i have repeatedly tried to get documents to look into this and this is a sunshine task force determination finding luis herrera, the city librarian, in violation of withholding public records because the only records they will release are what the friends say they gave and they have nothing they have produced to substantiate anything that the library actually got, whether in cash or in kind. so the library commission is not watching what they're doing although they're raising more than $5 million a year and spending another $2 million of priorly raised assets, the library commission has no idea where that money goes and what they're spending it on. the only one who does is mr. herrera and because i'm talking about this, it relates to the statement of incompatible activities. mr. herrera, for one specific thing, gets over $35,000 a year from the friends to spend at his

discretion. and he has provided no documents to show other than what he spends it on is taking people to lunch, paying for dues and other things and i've tried to get a hold of the city budget to see if the library actually pays. i find it hard to believe that we have the librarian of the year and the city budget doesn't include his dues for the national library association and california library association. something is rotten in the state of denmark and at the library commission and especially at the friends of the public library. >> hi. my name is catherine bremmer. i'm an officer of the library chapter of ceiu, local 1021. i'm here to congratulate the library and our group for working hard to make this an agreement that the library workers could live with and that's my perspective on it, is that the library as you've

discovered is a special place with special kinds of conflicts or investment with literature so it can be a problem but i thank you so much and thank everyone at the library who worked so hard for this. >> peter warfield, library users association. i think i also have come with some concerns but i don't think that you should make life easier and less accountable for a library that's already sadly lacking in accountability. there are some cross-outs here. i just don't think that the conflicts that you thought were a potential problem need to be removed because here and there an employee or another may write a book or provide some kind of a

service. the employees at the library presumably we hope and expect are well paid for their service and don't need to work for tutoring or educational institutions that provide services within the library and so on and so forth. if they do, let it be public and let it be excused publicly. i have a problem on page three with activities called -- item 2, activities with excessive time demands. if there's no clarity as to who determines whether those are excessive, it says "absent from his or her assignments on a regular basis," what does that mean, once, twice, quarterly, that are demonstrated to interfere with the city librarian performance, demonstrated by whom, to whom, totally vague, something like inls, what our president

appointed the librarian to, even small responsibilities in terms of time potentially can add up when you add travel time, preparation time, correspondence, appointment making, talking about it and so on and so forth. the decision maker, item 2 on page five, the public visibility for this is not specified and i think the decision maker needs to be -- this needs to be a process that's visible to the public and that's posted in a public place so that people can see what kinds of conflicts there are. i wanted to point out some conflicts at the library. the library gets donations from the friends, luis herrera, $35,000 in a discretionary fund two years in a row and more. what do the library friends get? naming opportunities, $1 million they boast in book sales, most or all of them obtained through the library's collection assistance. imbibe, a party that the library

has after hours on given friday so that the friends can use their facility to make money. is any of that contractual? i don't think so. the main annual author dinner, the step sales where discarded books are put out by library workers and money collected by the friends and secrecy. i can show you a contract that says for the bernal library art project where they want to get rid of a mural, the friends are swearing to secrecy the so-called community group that is dealing with this and is not allowed to say anything about their relationship with the friends. that's not a good deal and i'd like to see what in your statement of incompatible activities deals with any of these conflicts. thank you. >> good evening, david pillpel. i wanted to recognize the recent's appointment of commissioner hayon, a former member of the library

commission. anyway, and secondly, i wanted to support the final adoption of the amendments to this statement of incompatible activities. we've discussed this at many meetings, staff of the commission and at the library have been very diligent. this is ripe and timely for your action and i support the motion before you. thanks. >> are there any other comments? seeing none, we'll proceed to the vote. all in favor, please say aye. >> aye. >> thank you very much. the next item is selection of random audits for 2011 electoral committee. mr. st. croix, would you or ms. shaikh like to describe the process that we carry on and

your estimate here. >> i have a hearing problem. >> i'm sorry, it's further away than usual. ms. shaikh from the staff will introduce the item on selection of random audits for 2011. >> ok. so as the memo from staff on this item recommends, we will be selecting five committees for audit and they will be selected from three different levels of financial activity and we will have a member of the public read out the names of the committees before we draw them from a box. >> and i get to select the member of the public. why don't we do different people for each of the three sets. >> that sounds good. it looks like we have a volunteer. >> it would you like to do

whatever set she considers first. are there any questions or do we take comment before the process or is this simply procedural? are you volunteering? >> i had public comment on the selection. could i make that now prior to? >> yes. >> ok. david pillpel again. >> you can take a seat. we're going to take public comment about the process or any questions and then we will do the selection. >> thank you, david pillpel. my concern was, given the number of committees in the total pool and the number to be selected from each category, it appears to be somewhat disproportionate in the 10,000 to $50, 000 level. i understand there are staffing concerns about resources to conduct the audits but my suggestion is to increase the number selected to six, having

two from the $10,000 to $50,000 pool rather than one so there's a proportionate selection of one out of six. this would provide, as you see, a somewhat disproportionate selection. it would obviously slightly extend the resources required to complete six audits rather than five but i just think that the selection ought to be proportionate to the number in the pool for each category. thank you. >> thank you. is there any other public comment on this item? >> public comment. patrick minnetsov. i'm here on my own time as always. i request that the public at in the meeting be permitted to inspect the names in the containers used to randomly select committees for the audits before or after the audit selections have been made,